The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis (47 page)

On my last visit, my father seemed in worse condition than I had seen him before. When I asked him if he was working on anything in particular now, he said no and then turned his head slowly to my mother and looked at her in bewilderment, his mouth hanging open. There was an expression of pain or agony on his face that seemed habitual. She looked back at him, waited a moment, impassive, and then said: “Yes, you are. You’re writing about the Bible and anti-Semitism.” He continued to stare at her.

Later that evening, before he went to bed, he said: “This is symptomatic of my condition: You’re my daughter, and I’m proud of you, but I have nothing to say to you.”

He left to get ready for bed, and then came back into the room wearing dazzling white pajamas. My mother asked me to admire his pajamas, and he stood quietly while I did. Then he said: “I don’t know what I will be like in the morning.”

After he went to bed, my mother showed me a picture of him forty years before sitting at a seminar table surrounded by students. “Just look at him there!” she said in distress, as though it were some sort of punishment that he had become what he was now—an old man with a beaked profile like a nutcracker.

Saying goodbye, I held his hand longer than usual. He may not have liked it. It is impossible to tell what he is feeling, often, but physical contact has always been difficult for him, and he has always been awkward about it. Whether out of embarrassment or absentmindedness, he kept shaking his hand and mine up and down slightly, as though palsied.

Recently, my mother said he was still worse. He had fallen again, and he was having trouble with his bladder. Can he still work? I asked her. To me, it seemed that if he could still work, then he was all right, no matter what else was going wrong with him. Not really, she said. “He has been writing letters, but there are odd things in some of them. It may not matter, since they’re mostly to old friends.” She said maybe she should be checking them, though, before he sent them.

It was a phone conversation with another old woman that reminded me of a name I had forgotten for this time of life. After telling me about her angioplasty and her diabetes, she said: “Well, this is what you can expect when you enter the twilight years.” But it is hard not to think that my father’s bewilderment is only temporary, and that behind it, his sharp critical mind is still alive and well. With this younger, firmer mind he will continue to read the letters I send him and write back—our correspondence is only temporarily interrupted.

The latest letter I have seen from him was written not to me but to one of his grandsons. My mother thought I should see it before she sent it. The envelope was taped shut with strong packing tape. The entire letter concerns a mathematical rhyme he copied from the newspaper. It begins:

“A dozen, a gross and a score

plus three times the square root of four

divide it by seven plus five times eleven

equals nine to the square and not more.”

Then he explains mathematical terms and the solution of this problem. Because he changed the margins of his page to type the poem, and did not reset them, the whole letter is written in short lines like a poem:

“The total to be divided by 7 consists

of the following:

12 plus 144 plus 20 plus 3 times

the square root of 4.

These are the numerals above the line

over the divisor 7. They add up to 182,

which divided by seven equals 26.

26 plus 11 times 5 (55) is 81.

81 is 9 squared. A number squared

is a number multiplied by itself.

The square of 9 is nine times nine or 81.”

He goes on to explain the concept of squaring numbers, and of the cube, along the way giving the etymologies of certain words, including
dozen, score
, and
scoreboard
. He talks about the sign for square root being related to the form of a tree.

I tell my mother the letter seems a little strange to me. She protests, saying that it is quite correct. I don’t argue, but say he can certainly send it. The end of the letter is less strange, except for the line breaks:

“For me memory and balance fail rapidly.

You are young and have a university library

system for your use. I, who have

a good home reference collection,

sometimes can get other people to

look up things for me, but it is not the same.

I have to explain that I have increasingly

lost my memory and sense of balance,

I can’t go anywhere, not the libraries

or the bookstores to browse. We have to pay

a young woman to walk out with me

and prevent me from falling

though I take a mechanical walker with me.

I don’t mean it has an engine that propels it.

I do the propelling, but that it is

shiny and metal and has wheels.”

I like working near the baby, here at my desk by lamplight. The baby sleeps.

As though I were young and poor again, I was going to say.

But I am still young and poor.

Her children found it impossible to understand old Mrs. Iln now. They were forced to call her senile. But if they had paused a moment from their wild activities and tried to imagine her state of mind, they would have known that this was not the case.

Decades before, when her recent marriage had cast a pleasant light over her otherwise homely features, she had been as articulate as any other woman, perhaps even more articulate than was necessary. If her husband asked her where his cuff links were, she might answer, “I think they are in the top drawer of your bureau, though it could be that you took them off in the dining room and they are still there, on the table, or perhaps they have fallen onto the floor by now, in all this confusion; if they got stepped on I don’t know what I would do, I just don’t know …” When she had had a little wine and felt moved to give her opinion of the political situation, she would burst out with, “You know what I think? I think it’s a case of collective madness: I think they’re all insane, we’re all insane, but it isn’t our fault, and it isn’t the fault of our parents, and it isn’t the fault of our parents’ parents. I don’t know whose fault it is, but I would like to know …”

A few years later, she and her husband understood each other too well to need long explanations. Her opinions did not change over time, but hardened into obsessive and monotonous responses, and remained thoroughly familiar to her husband. She began to curtail her sentences, and her meaning was always clear to her husband and to her children, as they grew up. When her children left home, one by one, Mrs. Iln was gradually overcome by the feeling that she had no purpose in the world and no reason to be alive. She lost sight of herself completely. Her husband had grown into her until she hardly distinguished him from herself, and now her sentences were reduced to a few words: “Dresser drawer in your bedroom,” she would say, or “completely insane.” Since her husband knew what she was going to say before she said it, even those few words were unnecessary and in time were left unspoken. “I wonder where my cuff links are,” her husband would say softly, more to himself than to her. And even before she wagged her head toward the bureau, he would be there rummaging among his handkerchiefs and foreign coins. Or when he read aloud to her from the morning paper she would purse her lips and give him a certain stormy look and he would hear the “insane” of a few years before echoing in the air. He too might have stopped speaking, if he had not grown to like the constant murmur from his own lips.

Since nothing happened in her house that had not happened before, since her children, who found her silence unnerving after the din of their own homes, rarely visited her, Mrs. Iln no longer had any reason to speak, and silence became a deeply rooted habit. When her husband fell gravely ill, she tended him silently; when he died, she had no words for her grief; when her oldest children asked her to live with them, she shook her head and went home.

Sometimes she felt the need to give a word or two of explanation especially to her grandchildren, as she watched them from beyond her wall of silence; sometimes her children begged her to speak, as though it would prove something to them. And at these times she struggled as though in a nightmare to bring out one sound, and could not. It was as if by speaking she would have damaged something inside herself.

More and more often in her loneliness, thoughts would come to her as they had never come before, not even in her youth. They were thoughts more complex than “insanity,” and she would hear the words mounting in turmoil within her. But when her children came at the weekend to sit with her for an hour or two, it was hard to find the right moment to begin speaking of all she had thought, and if the moment came, when their restless chatter stopped and their eyes fell on her old pitted face, then she could rarely summon the words that had flown hither and thither in her head all week. And if she managed to summon the words to her mind, then she could never, never break through the last barrier and free herself from the constriction of her speechlessness.

At last she stopped trying, and when her children came they saw an expression on her face that had not been there before—a stiff, dead look, a look of blankness and defeat that reflected her hopelessness. They immediately seized upon this expression as evidence of senility. She was astonished and hurt by their reaction. If they had been more patient with her, if they had stayed with her for longer periods of time, they would have seen something in her that was not senility. Yet they clung to the idea of senility and registered her name in a nursing home.

At first she was horrified, and everything in her cried out against the coming change. With renewed vigor she frowned at them and sent them a look that her husband had well understood. But they were not moved. In their eyes, her every gesture could now be called senile. Even quite normal behavior seemed mad to them, and nothing she did could reach them.

But once she was actually living in the nursing home, she made peace with her surroundings. During the day she sat in the library reading and thinking. She read very slowly and spent many more hours staring at the wall than at the book. She tested her mind against what she read and it grew stronger. Only the nurses were not quite real to her and puzzled her: she thought their brittle good humor was not honest. They did not like her, because her lucid eye made them uneasy. But she moved comfortably among her bloodless, wrinkled companions, more comfortably than she had ever moved among the vigorous people of her former life. She found the silence in the crowded dining room appropriate. She understood very well the morose men and women who struggled along the garden paths in the afternoon or sat staring through the porch railings at the street during the long summer twilight. Tentatively at first, and with growing wonder, she realized that she had been nearly dead among the living. Among the nearly dead, she was at last beginning to live.

They have moved into separate bedrooms now.

That night she dreams she is holding him in her arms. He dreams he is having dinner with Ben Jonson.

I don’t want any more gifts, cards, phone calls, prizes, clothes, friends, letters, books, souvenirs, pets, magazines, land, machines, houses, entertainments, honors, good news, dinners, jewels, vacations, flowers, or telegrams. I just want money.

I think Mother is flirting with a man from her past who is not Father. I say to myself: Mother ought not to have improper relations with this man “Franz”! “Franz” is a European. I say she should not see this man improperly while Father is away! But I am confusing an old reality with a new reality: Father will not be returning home. He will be staying on at Vernon Hall. As for Mother, she is ninety-four years old. How can there be improper relations with a woman of ninety-four? Yet my confusion must be this: though her body is old, her capacity for betrayal is still young and fresh.

An ant can look up at you, too, and even threaten you with its arms. Of course, my dog does not know I am human, he sees me as dog, though I do not leap up at a fence. I am a strong dog. But I do not leave my mouth hanging open when I walk along. Even on a hot day, I do not leave my tongue hanging out. But I bark at him: “No! No!”

I don’t know if I can remain friends with her. I’ve thought and thought about it—she’ll never know how much. I gave it one last try. I called her, after a year. But I didn’t like the way the conversation went. The problem is that she is not very enlightened. Or I should say, she is not enlightened enough for me. She is nearly fifty years old and no more enlightened, as far as I can see, than when I first knew her twenty years ago, when we talked mainly about men. I did not mind how unenlightened she was then, maybe because I was not so enlightened myself. I believe I am more enlightened now, and certainly more enlightened than she is, although I know it’s not very enlightened to say that. But I want to say it, so I am willing to postpone being more enlightened myself so that I can still say a thing like that about a friend.

The husband and wife were competing in a Good Taste Contest judged by a jury of their peers, men and women of good taste, including a fabric designer, a rare-book dealer, a pastry cook, and a librarian. The wife was judged to have better taste in furniture, especially antique furniture. The husband was judged to have overall poor taste in lighting fixtures, tableware, and glassware. The wife was judged to have indifferent taste in window treatments, but the husband and wife both were judged to have good taste in floor coverings, bed linen, bath linen, large appliances, and small appliances. The husband was felt to have good taste in carpets, but only fair taste in upholstery fabrics. The husband was felt to have very good taste in both food and alcoholic beverages, while the wife had inconsistently good to poor taste in food. The husband had better taste in clothes than the wife though inconsistent taste in perfumes and colognes. While both husband and wife were judged to have no more than fair taste in garden design, they were judged to have good taste in number and variety of evergreens. The husband was felt to have excellent taste in roses but poor taste in bulbs. The wife was felt to have better taste in bulbs and generally good taste in shade plantings with the exception of hostas. The husband’s taste was felt to be good in garden furniture but only fair in ornamental planters. The wife’s taste was judged consistently poor in garden statuary. After a brief discussion, the judges gave the decision to the husband for his higher overall points score.