The Magnificent Spinster (33 page)

“We'll have a try,” he said, “you never know.”

But I did know.

“Death by coronary occlusion” was the verdict at the hospital.

If I had felt numb for the past half-hour, I now became so speeded up I could not sit still. They had taken me to a private room and a nurse was with me. “Take it easy,” she said. “Let me get you some coffee.”

But I couldn't drink. I kept saying to myself, What do I do now? Where does Ruth go? I have to make decisions. But it seemed as though I couldn't move although my mind was racing. Other people, a doctor, came in and talked to me. Someone had called a funeral home for me and there the body would be taken, I was told. The nurse wrote the address on a piece of paper and I put it in my pocket.

“Is there someone you could call who could go home with you?” I heard someone ask.

Suddenly I remembered the patients. “I have to go right away,” I said. “Her patients … they'll wonder what has happened.”

“She was a doctor?”

“A therapist. I must go right away.”

“Is there someone we could call for you?” the doctor, a very young man, asked. “You should spare yourself.”

They did call the agency where Ruth worked, and one of her fellow workers promised to go over right away and deal with the patients.

And in the end I persuaded them to let me go home alone. They called a taxi for me. I wanted to see Ruth again. But that was not possible. Things happen so fast. No doubt the body had already been wheeled out, on its way to the nightmare of a funeral home. What was I doing here? I must be where Ruth was, I felt. But in the taxi I changed my mind. Home first. People to call. My mind was racing again. No time for grief. People to call. When we got there I found I had no money on me, of course.

“Wait a minute, I have to go in to get my purse.”

In a way it was good to have to rush in with such a factual matter on my mind and rush out again. It would have been even harder to go in after the taxi drove off, to go in to that silence.…

What I had seen was Ruth's red parka thrown on a chair in the living room. And that was what I went home to, pressing it against me and suddenly crying like an abandoned child. But the motor in my mind would not stop saying, “People to call.”

Ruth had a sister older than she, married and living in New York. They had not been close, but she must be notified. I stood with the phone in my hands and her number before me, but the number I rang, the only person I needed to reach, was Jane's, and by the grace of God Jane answered.

“Oh dearie, I'll come right away … just hang on. I'll be there in under two hours.”

“Thanks.”

It never even occurred to me that it might be hard to get through. But the sun would melt the snow. And Jane, I knew, would make it somehow.

What I could not know was that those two hours would be my only time alone for days. What I could not know was that death brings with it a thousand errands and responsibilities, and the bereaved are too busy to mourn or even to think. I had just sat down in the living room, trying to take in what had happened, when the phone rang. It was the funeral home. Would the funeral be in a church? Would I want an open coffin? Was I the next of kin? Would there be visiting hours at the home? Flowers? I did not have the slightest idea how to answer any of these questions. I just managed to say, “I'll come this afternoon. I'll make decisions then.” Jane would be with me. Jane would know what to do.

Until she arrived I sat there, not even thinking, suspended in a sort of trance. Not grief. I have heard that when people are dying their whole life passes through their minds, and that in a way was what was happening to me. Floods of memories poured through me as though I could keep Ruth alive, keep her with me, by remembering. I saw her face so clearly, the deep line across her forehead, the rather stern mouth that opened in a smile in such a beautiful way. The dark eyes. Her strong, wise hands. And I could hear her warm voice. “Glorious!” she had called out to me only a few hours ago among the daffodils in the snow.

Death—I remembered Jane speaking of the small dead bird, so frail, its head falling to the side, the weakness of it Ruth, Ruth, Ruth, Ruth.

Finally I pulled myself together and wandered into the kitchen, for Jane, after all, would need some lunch. There was soup Ruth had made in the refrigerator and I got that out into a double boiler and some French bread. There was plenty of coffee since no one had had any breakfast. I set the table. Everything seemed almost insuperably difficult. Would a brandy help? No, I didn't dare. I felt I was holding myself together and even one drink might bring all control tumbling down.

And at last I heard the bell ring and dashed out to find Jane carrying a small suitcase and what looked like a hamper. I took these from her and for a long moment we hugged each other. The perfectly unselfconscious tears I felt on my neck did me good. I couldn't cry.

The hamper proved to have in it a cooked chicken from Sage's, a pie, and Earl Grey tea. “It seems absurd,” Jane said, rather shyly, “to bring food, but you'll have to eat, dearie, and it's so hard to think of cooking.” And when we had put the things away she said, “Come, let's sit down and talk about things.”

Of course she saw the red parka on the chair and knew it was Ruth's. “Shall I hang this up?”

“Don't,” I managed to say. “It's what she was wearing when we tried to rescue the daffodils … it's …” But I could not explain really that it was my security blanket and what I wanted to do was bury myself in it.

“We'll just leave it there, then,” Jane said and sat down by the cold hearth.

“Cam,” she said then, “do you think it would be a good idea to make a list of what has to be done right away?”

“I feel so bewildered.”

“Of course you do. But I can help with all those decisions.”

I went out to my study and got a pad and pencil. “First, the family. It would be wonderful if you could call Ruth's sister and her mother, Jane. Neither of them has been close to us. They disapproved of me, I guess.”

“Well, I'd better call them. But it would be better perhaps to wait until I can tell them when the funeral is to be.”

“Will you come with me to the funeral parlor after lunch? Could we wait till then for the family?”

I don't know what I would have done without Jane. And I realized that she had had to face all this many times in the last few years. She knew the ropes about death. And even before we sat down to lunch she had called my department at the college and asked them to post a notice that I could not meet my classes till Monday. It was Thursday. She had gone over Ruth's history and roughed out a short piece for the newspapers. Strange how all these definite, factual matters took my mind off Ruth herself. I even laughed at doing what sounded like a résumé, “as though one had to submit a résumé one last time before being allowed into heaven!”

But then I thought of Ruth's patients. What would become of them? How awful to lose a therapist when it was perhaps her hands that kept one from drowning.

“Jane, what can I do about the patients? Oh, how terrible it is for them!”

“Surely the institute will make arrangements. I wouldn't worry about that, Cam. Though it's like you, dearie, to think of them.”

For a few hours we were free of phone calls. And while we drank our soup, under Jane's gentle probing I told the whole story of the morning. It all poured out, every detail of it, as though I had made a record while it was happening and now must play it over and over.

“I should have made her see a doctor. I could have prevented this … I could have,” I said drily. For now guilt had simply occluded grief. “It's my fault.”

“I don't think that is quite true, Cam. Ruth made that decision herself, and all you could do you did, which was to beg her to see a doctor. We can't force people to do what seems right, can we?” Then she looked down, then up at me. “We all have guilt when someone dies, you know. It is the human thing. I wasn't there when Edith died. That haunts me. But one has to accept it, the guilt. Come to a sense of proportion. I finally came to see it was a kind of egotism in me that made the guilt.”

“Thank you for telling me.”

“May I make a suggestion?”

“Of course.”

“When I call Ruth's family I wonder whether it might not be a good idea to put them up in a hotel. It will be hard for you to have them here, and I'll be in the guest room.”

That meant that Jane could stay.

“I intend to stay as long as you need me, dearie. Of course I will,” she assured me.

And then, with sunlight streaming through the windows suddenly and lighting up the bunch of daffodils on the table, and before we cleared away, we talked about Ruth. Until then there had been too many things in the way. Her death had taken over her life.

“We had twenty years, Jane. That's a lot. I was lucky.”

“Yes,” Jane said, “you were. I always felt when I was with you that you had a rare understanding. And,” she went on thoughtfully, “I do believe that every good, fruitful relationship is a sort of beacon, a lighthouse. It must have comforted a lot of people to see you and Ruth together. You shed light.”

This was a new idea to me and I felt it deep down, so I couldn't find a word to say. “Ruth was such a wise, honest person,” I said after a moment. “Much wiser than I could ever be.”

“Maybe … but less brilliant.”

“I'm not brilliant, at best adequate as a professor of history, a little better as a scholar, I suppose.”

Jane looked amused. “I wasn't really thinking about professional life. I was thinking of you as a person, that flame in you.”

“Oh well,” I laughed then, “the mad hare.” But I wanted to talk about Ruth now. I wanted to bring her into this room alive. “What Ruth had was an amazing capacity to get inside people, to unknot their problems, to know when to be silent and when to open things up with a word. I envied her patients sometimes.…”

“Yes, I can imagine.”

“Because, you see, they got something from her that I rarely saw … only when Mother died, I learned so much from Ruth. She could be a blessed presence without saying a word. That is what she did for Mother at the end … she could sit there by the bed and just
be
a help. Oh Jane, I couldn't do that.”

“Love can get in the way,” Jane said gently. “It did between me and Marian. I know.” This was such a gift, Jane's saying that to me, that it really got to me only long afterwards. She looked at her watch. “Dearie, I think we had better go to the funeral home.” She reached across the table and held my hand in hers for a second. Then we quickly cleared off and were on our way.

There we found what seemed endless stumbling blocks. I knew that Ruth wanted cremation. So I was not prepared for the pressure the rather stern, kindly man we talked with put on me about the coffin. Here Jane's help was invaluable, and her natural authority. She could insist that we wanted the cheapest possible coffin, and do it without the shame I would have felt at seeming to haggle. That small, pale-gray box we chose seemed to me so unreal, the fact that Ruth would be placed in it so unreal, the fire to come so unreal … death itself so unreal that I felt icily calm. Neither of us went to church, so I was at a total loss when it came to the funeral.

“No funeral?” Jane murmured when I suggested that. “You know, Ruth's friends and family, and her patients, may really want to make a farewell. I think you should not deprive them. It is, in my view,” she added quickly, “a meaningful ceremony.”

“I could ask the Unitarian minister, Jack Fulbright.” He had come to mind because he and I had worked together on civil rights matters and I knew Ruth liked him. It ended by my calling him there and then, and he promised to come and talk over the service with me the next day. The funeral could be on Saturday at eleven in the small chapel.

We finally got home again at four. “How shall we ever get through all that has to be done?”

“I must call the family right away. Why don't you lie down for a half-hour, dearie? I'll let you know when I've done that, and the newspapers.”

“I guess that's a good idea.” I felt suddenly exhausted, and as though everything ahead, including my life, were an interminable journey. But when I lay down I was wide awake, strung up, sleep out of the question. All I could think of was that I had put off writing out a final exam and there were still senior theses to read. How would I ever do it? Go on … how? I must have finally dozed off, for I woke to the phone ringing, and staggered up from a nightmare about trying to rescue Ruth from an oncoming train. It was really better to be awake.

Jane had managed to reach both Alice, Ruth's sister, and her mother, and they would come to the funeral and spend the night before at the hotel. Arrangements about a room had been made. Jane would meet them at the local airport. She had even found out that there was a plane that would make the connection from Boston.

“Her mother asked about the will,” Jane said. “It seemed a little odd.”

“Oh God, where is it?” I stammered.

“There's time,” Jane said quickly.

“She left everything to me. I know that,” I said, “as I did in my will if I had died first.”

Three people had called. One, my chairman, two, a colleague of Ruth's, and the third, a young assistant professor at college who had been a patient for a few months the year before. Jane had told them about the funeral.

“People will come to the house afterwards,” she said. “We had better have coffee and sandwiches ready.” I had had a rest but Jane's face showed me that she was the one now to be given an hour's relief, and I forced her to go upstairs.

“We have all day tomorrow, Jane. We'll manage.” But how could I tell her what it meant to be able to say “we”?