Wait Until Tomorrow (2 page)

I stopped going regularly when I was about twelve. Before that I had to go because my mother was the organist and the choir director, and I couldn't stay at home alone. Besides, I liked being in that Gothic castle with its secret passageways, dungeons, and sequestered rooms full of pipes for the organ. The choir was my extended family. My godmother was a soprano in the choir. My godfather a baritone. The rest of them were like assorted aunts and uncles. I even adopted the church secretary as my grandmother.

Then I became a teenager, and figured I didn't need all that family anymore and damn sure didn't need to have some stupid God preached at me every Sunday. Of course, as Episcopalians we weren't exactly fire and brimstone, but the liturgy entailed telling God how worthless we were and how thankful we were that his Son died for our sins. And none of it made any sense to me. I was too young to have committed any sins anyway.

But in the ensuing years life has done me the favor of kicking me around a bit, and though I still don't get the dying-for-mysins bit, I have now committed some grievous sins of my own, and I have come to believe that something larger than me exists, something ineffable. I'm not sure, however, that it lurks in this big stone building with its stained glass depictions of ecstatic saints and doubting disciples. Or maybe it is here. Maybe it's everywhere, like they say.

My brother John (or Jo as we call him in the family), wearing tails and looking magisterial, comes down the aisle, bearing the conductor's baton. An orchestra awaits him. My mother is seated at the console of the big organ with its four keyboards and its row of foot pedals. The choir is robed and ready. The concert begins.

My mother has always composed. At Yale she studied with the famous composer Paul Hindemith; he told the dean that she was his most promising student. In her professional life, she'd written original arrangements for her various choirs to sing and a couple of commissioned musicals, and she'd even rescored the music for
The Lost Colony
, an outdoor drama in Manteo, North Carolina.

Marriage to my father, however, had kept her early ambitions in check. My brothers said that he threw her compositions in the fireplace when she was younger. She told me that the most crushing thing he ever did to her spirit happened one time when he came into the music room of our house and found her working on a composition. Overhearing the work, he sneered and said, “That's facile, isn't it?” He did much worse things, but his snide comment about her work stung the most.

Tonight is her vindication. She's written a piece from her heart, a requiem for two young men. The men (both in their early twenties) died in separate accidents within a couple of weeks of each other. They were sons of close friends of hers. As a woman with sons of her own, as a friend, as a human being, she was deeply affected by this sudden, inexplicable loss of promise. “Why do people die so young?” she wondered. “Why am I still alive?” Not being a particularly religious person, she couldn't fall back on that old standby: God's will.

I'm sitting in the crowded church, listening to this strange, sometimes atonal piece. It doesn't sound like traditional church music; the voices are haunting. The saints in their stained glass prisons hold their breaths and listen. Do the dead gather to hear the music written in their honor? The list on the program includes more than just the two who inspired it. There are about thirty names of various church members who have died within the past year. I know a few of them.

And am I thinking about the dead I have known? Two of my
cohorts from the bad old days died from drug overdoses. Other acquaintances died in drunk driving accidents, and others might as well be dead, locked away for years. No, I am not acknowledging them or any of the others. I am only looking forward. I have stepped out of my dark past, but I haven't really found my place in the world, and I have no idea that resurrecting this piece of music will become my mission more than a quarter of a century later.

AUTUMN 1989

I place my lips around the regulator, take a breath, and fall back off the side of the boat into the greenish-blue water. My hair floats across my face as I turn belly down and swim toward the bottom. The water is murky, churned-up sand making a thick filter. I look for my dive buddy, Joel, and spot his fins waving languidly. He's swimming toward the reef. A thin layer of water seeps into my wet suit and begins to warm me.

The current pushes and shoves. The surface is choppy, and my stomach didn't like the ride out. I've always been prone to motion sickness, so scuba has been a challenging hobby, but in the past, as soon as I've gotten below the surface, my stomach has relaxed and I've been able to enjoy the serene beauty of the coral reefs or the wrecks. Not today. The egg biscuit I had for breakfast taps on the door of my esophagus. I remember my dive instructor advising, “Don't puke in your regulator.”

I can no longer hear the purr of the boat engine. The only sound is the steady stream of bubbles pouring out of my regulator. I check my air tank and see that it's about three-quarters full. I'm not enjoying the dive. My stomach won't unknot. I feel tired and can't see much of anything. We're above the reef; a few random angelfish slide by. I swim alongside Joel and our eyes meet through the masks. He makes the okay sign, and I make it back.
I'm not really okay, but since this is such a crummy day, I can look forward to a short dive.

A strong arm pulls me back on the boat. My feet with the fins on them are unwieldy. I feel like a clumsy dinosaur until I slip my buoyancy compensator and the tank off my back.

“How are you doing?” Joel asks, pulling off his mask.

“I'm still seasick,” I answer. “I don't understand why.”

“Well, it's kinda rough out there.”

“Not that rough.”

I lean back and don't say anything else. I'm too sick to talk. The other divers are all back on board, and I can hear the boat engine roar as it's pushed full throttle. Once the boat starts speeding over the waves, the tossing will lessen and I'll get a little relief. Joel sits beside me and pats my arm. Joel is an editor at the newspaper where I work. My boyfriend, Hank, is out of town, a fairly common event, and Joel is one of the people I pal around with when he's gone.

Joel and I put our gear into the back of his car and make our exit from the dive park at Marathon Key. My stomach has finally begun to settle down and I'm hungry. We're driving along US 1 with the wind blowing through the windows and the sun jackhammering through the clouds. We stop at a little Cuban roadside joint for coffee and subs.

“Feeling better?” Joel asks. I nod.

“It's funny,” I tell him. “The other day at aerobics class I got so tired. I couldn't even finish the class. And then today . . . well, I've never stayed seasick once I got in the water.”

I gaze at palmetto bushes on the other side of the road. A yellow cat slinks under the table. It looks like a scrawny version of my own cat, Monster, who found and adopted me the day after a bad abortion six years earlier.

“Oh.”

“What is it?” Joel asks.

“I know why I'm sick,” I tell him, setting down my
media noche
on the round mosaic table. “I'm pregnant.”

 

As I sail down the escalator at the San Francisco Airport in my long black coat, I look into Hank's eyes and I am reminded of smoky topaz. I slide into those eyes and find myself ensconced in a warm dark place. When Hank looks at me, he sees a woman carrying a burden. He sees cells multiplying, growing fat, thickening against him like a wall.

Hank kisses me when I reach the bottom, not a passionate kiss, but a soft dry kiss. He is shy about kissing in public places, even here in this airport, but he kisses me, and the glow I feel keeps the chill away, the chill I have felt coming like a long delayed winter. He takes my suitcase from the carousel in baggage claim and tosses it into the trunk of a rental car.

I close my eyes when we get in the car. I had no idea that I would be so tired, that pregnancy would be like a drug, that it would fall on me like the San Francisco fog into which we are driving.

“There's damage from the earthquake everywhere,” Hank says. “We'll have to stay at a hotel here by the airport. All downtown is closed.”

“Mmmm,” I answer and nod against the cool windowpane. Then I rouse myself and say, “Not the best time to take a vacation to San Francisco, I guess.”

“It won't matter,” he says. “We'll go up north and see the mountains, maybe drive into Nevada.”

 

Hank grew up in California, but we live in Florida. Our yard is a rain forest and our swimming pool is an emerald pond. When it is not emerald, but chlorine-doused blue, we drink Cointreau and
loll in the water in the moonlight. We are not married. He travels for a television network. I work for a newspaper. We planned this trip to California months ago—long before the earthquake happened, before the pregnancy. I told him the news on the phone. I knew he would not be happy about it.

 

In San Francisco we eat prawns, we buy sourdough bread and Ghirardelli chocolates, we laugh at the seals in the bay because they remind us of our dog, and we drive down windy little streets and visit Chinatown. We appear to be blissfully in love, but we both know that it may be the last time in our lives we ever feel like this.

We leave San Francisco and drive north through small California towns. We steal an apple from an orchard and share it, the sweet juice dripping down our chins. We eat seafood in Eureka and stay in the oldest hotel in town. We drive to Mount Shasta and hike through virgin snow. We stop wherever we see rocks and streams. He collects water in a canteen he has had since he was a Boy Scout. I sit by the stream, my long black coat fanned on the rock, and drink the cool water from his canteen. The air around me is a fresh new skin. Every single moment seems to be amplified, like the slow motion of the cinema; every moment deepens and widens and holds more than just time.

As I am standing by a grape arbor above Jack London's house, a rainbow stretches across the sky like the trail of a running goddess. I can see the beauty, but I cannot feel it. Hank has grown silent, and I am like someone inside an upturned glass. People will wonder why I am so sad. He's just a man, they'll say, and not a very good one if this is how he treats you. But I am still the fatherless girl, the girl who stuck needles in her arms and straws up her nose and drank her way to oblivion until I found the one person who could drive away the demons.

After we visit Jack London's house, where we see two startled deer and the charred ruins of Wolf House, we head west into the desert. The unspoken fear that has dogged him ever since he learned I was pregnant has caught up to us and clings to his back. He realizes that I am not going to change my mind. I am going to have this child.

We catapult into gaudy, glitzy Reno. I am perpetually hungry. At three in the morning we eat in the hotel surrounded by gamblers edgy to get back to their games. We glower at each other with raccoon eyes. His ragged fear has turned into rage. My passivity has evolved into stony stoicism. The handshake is over; we retreat to our corners.

We go to Virginia City—dirt and dust and a cold wind blowing by brown shops selling turquoise jewelry. We pace along the sidewalks, saying nothing. Then I see a dusty cemetery with toppled tombstones. In the cemetery I stare at tiny little graves, and I can't help thinking about the last time, my legs up in stirrups, the tube inside me, the sucking sound, the sudden inerasable pain. The hemorrhaging afterward.

We get back in the car, and his pain spills out of him like oil.

Why, he wants to know, over and over again, why must you do this? Why, I ask, why can you not accept this?

“I want you out of the house,” he says.

“Fine,” I answer.

And before I know it we are barreling down a desert highway, the Sierras looming up beside us. I look at the dusky mountains and the hills that look soft and rounded as if patted with two soft hands. I see the thrusts of earth, the long lines of sediment sticking out at an angle showing the pattern of a fault line. This scenery is the result of old upheavals. That's how it is. You can start off with everything looking one way, and then something happens, and the landscape is changed forever.

I remember that I fell in love with him because he was so different from every other man I'd ever met. He didn't care about my past. He gave me freedom to come and go. He never said anything he didn't mean. He had a gentle side that he kept hidden behind his humor. Now I am wishing he were more like other people—that we were more like other couples who get married and have children and are happy about it.

Finally, we pull over and stand outside the car watching the sun shoot purple streamers of light as it sets over the desert. The sand reflects the sky like a still lake. The beauty makes me think there must be a God, so I ask for a miracle, but nothing happens.

The sky blackens. Hank does not look at me.

We get in the car and head to LA where he leaves me in a hotel room with a plane ticket home. When the door shuts behind him, I stare at nothing for a long time. Then I go into the white tiled bathroom, take off my clothes, turn on the water in the bathtub, and sink down.

I think about my mother—she wasn't perfect, but I never knew anyone who tried harder to be a good mother. Alone, she raised three children, supporting us with her musical talent. Her mother, Skipper, raised four children by herself during the Depression. Skipper was one of the first women to be a licensed riverboat pilot. She worked as a cartographer during World War II. My mother's paternal grandmother supported her son after her husband ran off to be an actor. She worked as a reporter and a probation officer for the courts where her son later served as one of the most powerful judges in Connecticut.