Of course, I didn"t believe in life after death or the virgin birth or the Inquisition or the infallibility of that little monkey-faced Pope or anything, but I didn"t have to let the priest see this, I could just concentrate on my sin, and he would help me repent.
The only trouble was, Church, even the Catholic Church, didn"t take up the whole of your life. No matter how much you knelt and prayed, you still had to eat three meals a day and have a job and live in the world.
I thought I might see how long you had to be a Catholic before you became a nun, so I asked my mother, thinking she"d know the best way to go about it.
My mother had laughed at me. "Do you think they"ll take somebody like you, right off the bat? Why you"ve got to know all these catechisms and credos and believe in them, lock, stock and barrel. A girl with your sense!"
Still, I imagined myself going to some Boston priest--it would have to be Boston, because I didn"t want any priest in my home town to know I"d thought of killing myself. Priests were terrible gossips.
I would be in black, with my dead white face, and I would throw myself at this priest"s feet and say, "0 Father, help me."
But that was before people had begun to look at me in a funny way, like those nurses in the hospital.
I was pretty sure the Catholics wouldn"t take in any crazy nuns. My Aunt Libby"s husband had made a joke once, about a nun that a nunnery sent to Teresa for a checkup. This nun kept hearing harp notes in her ears and a voice saying over and over, "Alleluia!" Only she wasn"t sure, on being closely questioned, whether the voice was saying Alleluia or Arizona. The nun had been born in Arizona. I think she ended up in some asylum.
I tugged my black veil down to my chin and strode in through the wrought-iron gates. I thought it odd that in all the time my father had been buried in this graveyard, none of us had ever visited him. My mother hadn"t let us come to his funeral because we were only children then, and he had died in the hospital, so the graveyard and even his death had always seemed unreal to me.
I had a great yearning, lately, to pay my father back for all the years of neglect, and start tending his grave. I had always been my father"s favorite, and it seemed fitting I should take on a mourning my mother had never bothered with.
I thought that if my father hadn"t died, he would have taught me all about insects, which was his specialty at the university. He would also have taught me German and Greek and Latin, which he knew, and perhaps I would be a Lutheran. My father had been a Lutheran in Wisconsin, but they were out of style in New England, so he had become a lapsed Lutheran and then, my mother said, a bitter atheist.
The graveyard disappointed me. It lay at the outskirts of the town, on low ground, like a rubbish dump, and as I walked up and down the gravel paths, I could smell the stagnant salt marshes in the distance.
The old part of the graveyard was all right, with its worn, flat stones and lichen-bitten monuments, but I soon saw my father must be buried in the modern part with dates in the nineteen forties.
The stones in the modern part were crude and cheap, and here and there a grave was rimmed with marble, like an oblong bathtub full of dirt, and rusty metal containers stuck up about where the person"s navel would be, full of plastic flowers.
A fine drizzle started drifting down from the gray sky, and I grew very depressed.
I couldn"t find my father anywhere.
Low, s.h.a.ggy clouds scudded over that part of the horizon where the sea lay, behind the marshes and the beach shanty settlements, and raindrops darkened the black mackintosh I had bought that morning. A clammy dampness sank through to my skin.
I had asked the salesgirl, "Is it water-repellent?"
And she had said, "No raincoat is ever water-repellent. It"s showerproofed." It"s showerproofed."
And when I asked her what showerproofed was, she told me I had better buy an umbrella.
But I hadn"t enough money for an umbrella. What with bus fare in and out of Boston and peanuts and newspapers and abnormal-psychology books and trips to my old home town by the sea, my New York fund was almost exhausted.
I had decided that when there was no more money in my bank account I would do it, and that morning I"d spent the last of it on the black raincoat.
Then I saw my father"s gravestone.
It was crowded right up by another gravestone, head to head, the way people are crowded in a charity ward when there isn"t enough s.p.a.ce. The stone was of a mottled pink marble, like canned salmon, and all there was on it was my father"s name and, under it, two dates, separated by a little dash.
At the foot of the stone I arranged the rainy armful of azaleas I had picked from a bush at the gateway of the graveyard. Then my legs folded under me, and I sat down in the sopping gra.s.s. I couldn"t understand why I was crying so hard.
Then I remembered that I had never cried for my father"s death.
My mother hadn"t cried either. She had just smiled and said what a merciful thing it was for him he had died, because if he had lived he would have been crippled and an invalid for life, and he couldn"t have stood that, he would rather have died than had that happen.
I laid my face to the smooth face of the marble and howled my loss into the cold salt rain.
I knew just how to go about it.
The minute the car tires crunched off down the drive and the sound of the motor faded, I jumped out of bed and hurried into my white blouse and green figured skirt and black raincoat. The raincoat felt damp still, from the day before, but that would soon cease to matter.
I went downstairs and picked up a pale blue envelope from the dining room table and scrawled on the back, in large, painstaking letters: I am going for a long walk. I am going for a long walk.
I propped the message where my mother would see it the minute she came in.
Then I laughed.
I had forgotten the most important thing.
I ran upstairs and dragged a chair into my mother"s closet. Then I climbed up and reached for the small green strongbox on the top shelf. I could have torn the metal cover off with my bare hands, the lock was so feeble, but I wanted to do things in a calm, orderly way.
I pulled out my mother"s upper right-hand bureau drawer and slipped the blue jewelry box from its hiding place under the scented Irish linen handkerchiefs. I unpinned the little key from the dark velvet. Then I unlocked the strongbox and took out the bottle of new pills. There were more than I had hoped.
There were at least fifty.
If I had waited until my mother doled them out to me, night by night, it would have taken me fifty nights to save up enough. And in fifty nights, college would have opened, and my brother would have come back from Germany, and it would be too late.
I pinned the key back in the jewelry box among the clutter of inexpensive chains and rings, put the jewelry box back in the drawer under the handkerchiefs; returned the strongbox to the closet shelf and set the chair on the rug in the exact spot I had dragged it from.
Then I went downstairs and into the kitchen. I turned on the tap and poured myself a tall gla.s.s of water. Then I took the gla.s.s of water and the bottle of pills and went down into the cellar.
A dim, undersea light filtered through the slits of the cellar windows. Behind the oil burner, a dark gap showed in the wall at about shoulder height and ran back under the breezeway, out of sight. The breezeway had been added to the house after the cellar was dug, and built out over this secret earth-bottomed crevice.
A few old, rotting fireplace logs blocked the hole mouth. I shoved them back a bit. Then I set the gla.s.s of water and the bottle of pills side by side on the flat surface of one of the logs and started to heave myself up.
It took me a good while to heft my body into the gap, but at last, after many tries, I managed it, and crouched at the mouth of the darkness, like a troll.
The earth seemed friendly under my bare feet, but cold. I wondered how long it had been since this particular square of soil had seen the sun.
Then, one after the other, I lugged the heavy, dust-covered logs across the hole mouth. The dark felt thick as velvet. I reached for the gla.s.s and bottle, and carefully, on my knees, with bent head, crawled to the farthest wall.
Cobwebs touched my face with the softness of moths. Wrapping my black coat round me like my own sweet shadow, I unscrewed the bottle of pills and started taking them swiftly, between gulps of water, one by one by one.
At first nothing happened, but as I approached the bottom of the bottle, red and blue lights began to flash before my eyes. The bottle slid from my fingers and I lay down.
The silence drew off, baring the pebbles and sh.e.l.ls and all the tatty wreckage of my life. Then, at the rim of vision, it gathered itself, and in one sweeping tide, rushed me to sleep.
14.
It was completely dark.
I felt the darkness, but nothing else, and my head rose, feeling it, like the head of a worm. Someone was moaning. Then a great, hard weight smashed against my cheek like a stone wall and the moaning stopped.
The silence surged back, smoothing itself as black water smooths to its old surface calm over a dropped stone. The silence surged back, smoothing itself as black water smooths to its old surface calm over a dropped stone.
A cool wind rushed by. I was being transported at enormous speed down a tunnel into the earth. Then the wind stopped. There was a rumbling, as of many voices, protesting and disagreeing in the distance. Then the voices stopped.
A chisel cracked down on my eye, and a slit of light opened, like a mouth or a wound, till the darkness clamped shut on it again. I tried to roll away from the direction of the light, but hands wrapped round my limbs like mummy hands, and I couldn"t move.
I began to think I must be in an underground chamber, lit by blinding lights, and that the chamber was full of people who for some reason were holding me down.
Then the chisel struck again, and the light leapt into my head, and through the thick, warm, furry dark, a voice cried.
"Mother!"
Air breathed and played over my face.
I felt the shape of a room around me, a big room with open windows. A pillow molded itself under my head, and my body floated, without pressure, between thin sheets.
Then I felt warmth, like a hand on my face. I must be lying in the sun. If I opened my eyes, I would see colors and shapes bending in upon me like nurses.
I opened my eyes.
It was completely dark. was completely dark.
Somebody was breathing beside me.
"I can"t see," I said.
A cheery voice spoke out of the dark. "There are lots of blind people in the world. You"ll marry a nice blind man someday."
The man with the chisel had come back.
"Why do you bother?" I said. "It"s no use."
"You mustn"t talk like that." His fingers probed at the great, aching boss over my left eye. Then he loosened something, and a ragged gap of light appeared, like the hole in a wall. A man"s head peered round the edge of it.
"Can you see me?"
"Yes."
"Can you see anything else?"
Then I remembered. "I can"t see anything." The gap narrowed and went dark. "I"m blind."
"Nonsense! Who told you that?"
"The nurse."
The man snorted. He finished taping the bandage back over my eye. "You are a very lucky girl. Your sight is perfectly intact."
"Somebody to see you."
The nurse beamed and disappeared.
My mother came smiling round the foot of the bed. She was wearing a dress with purple cartwheels on it and she looked awful.
A big tall boy followed her. At first I couldn"t make out who it was, because my eye only opened a short way, but then I saw it was my brother.
"They said you wanted to see me."
My mother perched on the edge of the bed and laid a hand on my leg. She looked loving and reproachful, and I wanted her to go away.
"I didn"t think I said anything."
"They said you called for me." She seemed ready to cry. Her face puckered up and quivered like a pale jelly.
"How are you?" my brother said.
I looked my mother in the eye.
"The same," I said.
"You have a visitor."
"I don"t want a visitor."
The nurse bustled out and whispered to somebody in the hall. Then she came back. "He"d very much like to see you."
I looked down at the yellow legs sticking out of the unfamiliar white silk pajamas they had dressed me in. The skin shook flabbily when I moved, as if there wasn"t a muscle in it, and it was covered with a short, thick stubble of black hair.
"Who is it?"
"Somebody you know."
"What"s his name."
"George Bakewell."
"I don"t know any George Bakewell."
"He says he knows you."
Then the nurse went out, and a very familiar boy came in and said, "Mind if I sit on the edge of your bed?"