MARIAN HALL
Bene vixit, bene qui latuit.
He lives well who is well hidden.
Ovid, Tristia
E io ch’al fine di tutt’ i disii
appropinquava, si com’ io dovea,
l’ardor del desiderio in me finii.
As I drew nearer to the end of all desire,
I brought my longing’s ardor to a final height.
Dante, Paradiso, xxxiii, 46-48
PART i—Golubushka
CHAPTER 1
My whole life has been a matter of returning. I return to memories, and I return to the actual places those memories recall. I return to years. I return to seasons. I return to November. It doesn’t matter what year the calendar says. November is a month apart from any year.
Return. Return. Re-turn the knobs of memory’s same doors. Re-turn the dials on the viewfinder, and this is the view that it finds.
A phone shrills on a bedside table. It’s eleven o’clock on a wet night in a room in a women’s hostel in midtown Manhattan. The silence hovers tensely now, minute to minute.
I am not the woman in that hostel room, all those years ago. No, I’m only thinking about her—thinking about her daily, now. My own room, nowadays, is a private ward in Mercy Hospital. A space measuring twelve by fifteen, and I am lying propped in a metal-frame bed against pillows constructed in some synthetic fabric that keeps them firm beneath the relentless weight of my back.
A sash window gives on the parking lot. On the nightstand beside me is a desk lamp, a telephone with an outside line, a top spiral-bound 8 1/2 by 11 notebook, three ballpoint pens, and a tape recorder.
I have something I must try to write. One who has lived a life such as mine must try, anyway, to write it.
In this room, the walls could use a fresh coat of white paint, and the dull, drizzly light of outside suggests a day that never doffed its bathrobe. So, on that morning two days ago when I was shown in here, I went ahead at first and indulged a panic, one of those ten-minute flash-fears: lying in the bed, flat and rigid as bone.
These fears will never leave me altogether, as long as I am here—and I expect to be here quite a while, a regular rest-cure length, though in my case it is more the test-cure: two weeks of tests and of meals on plastic trays.
The bottom is falling out. I can feel it. Over the last five years I had begun to pack it under me: solid soil, layer upon layer of it. Each year another. I hadn’t moved. In five whole years I had not had to move.
But now it’s crumbling. I might have known. Permanence doesn’t come to those like me. Somehow in the end, dense earth always dries and crumbles to dust. I feel again that murmur of the heart—the murmur that has always been my real home.
I do not understand where I am and what I am doing there.
When I say that, I don’t only mean the hospital. Though I might try to lay claim to this place by labeling it the country of my youth, in reality it’s nothing more than some medium-sized Massachusetts mill town, at the center of which a river trickles and stalls between stone embankments, clogged with leaves and brambles, exuding burnt-sugar fumes.
And what an appalling time of year anywhere, when bare branches make querulous shadows on the ceiling, like old blind women who are palpating the furniture to discover where they are.
But as I think all this and nothing happens, my breathing inevitably calms and becomes regular, and it occurs to me—as it always has, as it has never failed to in any one of these single rooms the last forty years, that there is something in this shabby solitude very much like a bower of freedom.
Because, after all, the phone has an outside line, and there’s the paper, and there are the pens, and there’s the tape recorder to speak into when my energy flags.
I must try to write it. Start again—start further back this time. Return. Return. Make the returning worth something at last.
In a corner, within reaching distance of my bed, all this time there has been a stubby box radio, tucked away on a wheelie cart, unplugged. Around two this afternoon, my door burst open without a knock, and in scurried the young one, the rabbit-faced nurse, cheeks aflame. Without a word, and moving as awkwardly as a sailor newly set ashore, and making a profusion of noise as in her distress she commenced a disproportionately difficult struggle with the rolling cart, she wrenched the radio out of its corner and threw herself into a quarterback crouch to find the outlet to plug it into, and then straightened up, hands shaking.
I heard a spark of static and then a familiar newsman’s voice, the one that sounds as if he’s speaking through a mechanism like an automatic muscle builder to specially stretch and weight each word.
The nurse stood there, back to me, sniffling and staring at the machine. A small spasm crossed her shoulders.
I have never enjoyed being made to feel like the furniture. “Miss!” I barked. “Excuse me, Miss! The meaning of this, please? The meaning of this—display?”
In a blubbery voice, she told me to listen to the radio, and then she stumbled out of the room, head down and leading, like a shot ram.
But it was the president who had been shot, and this was how I learned the news. This: a hospital-room radio. And indeed, over the course of my whole life, the news that has rocked the world—has rocked all my worlds—has always come through the radio.
But I had no one to interpret it for me this time. This time it crackled into life from the clear blue. There had been no premonitory rumblings.
What more proof could be required that I am thoroughly superannuated? In a seethe of desperate triumph, I actually tried to reach Agent Jackson on the phone to tell him. It was as if I thought that now they’d have to cut me loose. But the line was busy—once, twice, three times in half an hour, busy . . . busy . . . busy.
Six days from now will be Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving, Fedya. An auspicious time of year to start anew? November was always the month of great crises, new beginnings—and some awestruck endings—for me.
And I have been thinking, as I say, about embarking on a plan.
Only—also—I keep thinking of Mrs. Gunther. Thinking? Dreaming. Riding the nightmare. This nightmare always starts the same way. A phone shrills on a bedside table. A woman lies on the bed beside it, her body rigid as mine when I lay here. She is my age. She is the age I am now. She reaches over and she answers the phone, and after a minute she quietly cradles it, and then she rises from the bed and stands in front of the mirror and winds her hair on top of her head and stabs a chopstick in the chignon to hold it.
Her days. My days. Cold fear those days, unlighted room, cold phone.
I was living in the—fifty-ninth? thirty-sixth? fortieth? seventy-third? shall I pretend I could keep count? pretend I didn’t?—efficiency home of my lifetime. Maybe it seems I use the word home ironically. Allow me to suggest that I do not. Moving into each of them, didn’t I start to work immediately to make it a place I wouldn’t dread returning to at night? Didn’t I weigh myself down all those years, skittering from room to room, with boxes of framed prints—my maps, of course; and my beloved reproductions, Schiele and Klimt; and the more recent, the anonymous photographs, stark cityscapes I’d continued to love even long after I’d moved to the city itself?
The purity of unity and of silence. It was what I worshipped. It was what I wanted to worship.
I had been suffering for months. But on how infinitely many dawns over the past thirty-five years had nausea pangs been my reveille? The only difference these days was that I knew it couldn’t mean pregnancy. This only gave me even less reason to notice it at all.
No: it was only when it stopped me being able to drink that I took note. Oh, then it was a problem.
You know, my comrades, fellows of the bottle. You know the vertigo of the body suddenly coming to reject what it had known as medicine. When I couldn’t any longer attain those paradoxically sharp edges suffused with a cottony glow—when I was robbed of the solitary nighttime stumbles past peaceably deserted storefronts—or, better yet, the rambling drives down the winding roads of this hill country of my youth, the nights I dared (it wasn’t my car of course, it was the school loaner parked behind the caretaker’s cottage, the caretaker himself one of those comrades-in-liquor and the extra key dangling from a hook just inside his garage door)—better yet, I say, the thrilling adolescent ritual of the self-tests of drunken competence at the wheel (and I passed them all—the only time in life, it seems, I ever escaped the shadow of the law): in short, if I lost all this, of course, I lost what kept me sane enough and able to go on.
I missed a week of school. The headmaster phoned early on Tuesday of the second week. I told him I would call my doctor and see if he should check me into the hospital. When I got off the phone, that’s just what I did.
Mrs. Gunther again. In my mind I see her on the sidewalk. She’s rehearsed this scenario in her own mind a thousand times, and it’s unspooling just as she’s imagined, yes. The all-night drugstore on the corner. He followed her in there, it’s true—the younger one, he did follow her in there. But she got her chance nevertheless to make a short scene in front of the counter boy; she made a scene about the disgusting coffee he had served her and told him in a shrill voice she’d be back the next day to speak to the manager. Remember me, she said, and then she pushed right past the younger one and back out onto the street.
The clop-clop of her heels on pavement: a truly gauche cacophony. But it can’t be helped. And meanwhile everyone who lives on these streets asleep behind Venetian blinds or Christmas-colored velvet drapes or else just plain white shades, maybe a crack by the handle. Now she’s remembering every curtain she ever had on a window in any of her many, many, infinitely many, homes or rooms or sleeping berths over the years—the years—the calendar says it’s fifty-four years—of her life.
After I was ready—water splashed upon me from the running faucet (I couldn’t face the full roar of a shower) and lipstick in a color called seashell first applied, then rubbed off since it only made me look more haggard—I set myself to wait for the young woman from the school who would arrive to serve for the day as my companion, chauffeur, and valet.
Gorgeous idea! I indulged the fantasy a moment, then dismissed it and called a cab.
It came quite promptly for this hamlet: ten minutes. Outside in the pearly twilight of late November, the streetlights already shone thinly on the pitted sidewalks and knee-high hedges of this rental neighborhood in this far-northern community so much like the hometowns of my earliest memories. I’d like to say we both were Puritan, once upon a time. . . . .
