Ideas of Heaven Page 11

  Eli said that the two of them had talked about his going over at Christmas for another visit. That was fine with me, if Peggy meant it—I hated her getting him all eager and then changing her mind, as she had done before. But I wanted him to go—to have more of her, if he could. They were great fans of each other, at this moment, and I wanted him to get the best of that. Eli smoked and drank and slept with girls, but he was just a kid.

  Through the fall, Peggy phoned pretty often. The trip seemed to be on. From London Peggy and her boyfriend were going to drive Eli in their tiny clunky car to visit some friends in Bristol and then maybe head into Wales—Eli would really like these places, Peggy said. I bought Eli a leather bomber jacket for the colder weather, and he bought a sequined scarf to give his mother and a cowboy shirt for her boyfriend. I had to help him guess the size on the shirt.

  I was busy before the holidays, at work too much of the time. Then we had trouble getting in touch with Peggy. At night I was too overworked to sleep, and while Mattina lay next to me, I heard Eli talking into the telephone at ungodly hours of the morning, the best time to reach his mother across the ocean. He had his ticket, he just wanted to tell her when to pick him up at Heathrow. He had been leaving messages for several days and she wasn’t calling him back. “Just checkin’ in again,” he kept telling her phone machine. He was working at sounding casual and not forlorn.

  I didn’t get anywhere either when I called her at breakfast time, but I barked a scathing speech into her message tape. “Listen to me, Peggy. You always think you’re the only fucking person in the universe. What has to happen to get you past this dumbass delusion? When are you going to get it? You’re not the only pebble on the beach.”

  Afterwards I knew I sounded sanctimonious, and I thought Peggy was only going to be inflamed by this hectoring. I was afraid that she might decide not to call back at all, just for spite. Was she spiteful? Or was it narcissistic of me to think my effect on her could be as mighty as that? I got so gnarled up in the twists of this question that I broke a carved marble statue I was moving from one part of the store to the other. It was an angel that once had been on a grave, and it lost half an alabaster wing while I was deep in thought and not paying attention.

  Probably, I thought, Peggy was just going to call at the last minute, surprised that we had ever doubted her. But Eli was nervous, and his room became a cocoon of noise, a vibrating monument to the booming technology of amplifiers. There were only three more days left before his scheduled departure, so we let him do it. I didn’t know what else to give him.

  Mattina and I hung out in the yard, which was only slightly quieter than the house, and we argued about whether Eli could be coaxed into leaving the premises for Mexican food, which he liked. I heard a repeated trill that was either the phone or something in the music, and Mattina made me go in and check.

  I had to ask the person to wait while I yelled at Eli to turn down the volume. “Tom?” the voice said. “Tom?”

  It was Rita, Peggy’s mother, sounding weird and expressionless. The trip is off, I thought, Peggy’s delegated her mother to be the apologizer, to bring her bullshit excuses to Eli. I had a flash of pure hatred for Peggy.

  “I have bad news,” Rita said.

  “What?” I said. “What?” I had to run to tell Eli to make the music softer.

  “Okay,” I said, when I was back.

  “I have bad news,” Rita began again. “About Peggy.”

  She told me Peggy had been driving to the country for the weekend, with her boyfriend in his little car, and when they were leaving London, not even outside the city yet, a truck came out of an underpass. “A huge truck,” Rita said. “It pushed them off the road. Just like that.”

  I heard myself moan.

  “They took her to the hospital,” Rita said, “but it was too late. No, that’s not right. She was in the hospital for an hour before she died. I think it was an hour. I can’t remember everything.”

  Had Rita gotten any of this right? She often got things wrong. For a second a wild scorn for her puffed me up with false hope.

  The man had lived for two days longer, she said. But it had taken the American Embassy five days to locate Rita in Illinois. “Me, her only relative,” Rita said.

  But I was thinking of Peggy, strapped into a small, tinny car in a ditch. We had to talk about which of us should tell Eli—I said I would—and whether he would want to go to the memorial service in Chicago.

  As it happened, Eli had heard most of the conversation—there was never any privacy in that house—but I had to look at him while I said it again. He was trying to hold his face together, but his mouth kept slipping into weeping. Then Mattina came in and I had to tell her. It was somehow decided that we would all go to Chicago together, and suddenly we had a lot of work to do about getting airline tickets right before Christmas and finding hotel rooms and canceling Eli’s other flight and packing and calling Eli’s school. I was caught up then in a wave of duty, a wave of listed tasks, and underneath that surge was the pressing, unrolling urgency of Peggy’s death. I had to do all these things—now, fast, without failing—as if they could save her.

  I HAD NEVER even been to Chicago. Peggy’s hometown and I’d never visited it once—I kept thinking about this on the plane. Had I ever known Peggy? But I thought that I had. She was with me now so distinctly; she had been in my mind every second since Rita told me. Wearing a blue lace bra she’d had in London, or asleep on my shoulder on the bus in Thailand, or in our old apartment in New York, nursing Eli on the couch. Part of me was pleased (although that is not the right word) to know she had died in England, in a place we had a history together. I had a claim on that part of the world, where I had flung myself with such recklessness into the certainty between us.

  So, after all, we have not

  failed to make use of these spaces, theses

  paces of ours. (How frighteningly great they must be,

  since thousands of years have not made them overflow with our feelings.)

  On the plane to Chicago none of us talked much, and that was fine. Eli stared out the window and didn’t even put on his Walkman. Mattina read the airline magazine for hours and let Eli drink the beer she’d ordered. We landed in the kind of frigid winter temperatures I had forgotten about, in all my years in California. Only Eli, in the leather jacket he’d bought for England, wasn’t shivering in the wind when we walked down the jetway. I held Mattina under my coat to keep her warm.

  It was twilight when we arrived, and the memorial service was the next morning. None of us wanted to do anything but crash out in the hotel. I’d gotten Eli his own room and he disappeared into it. Mattina and I lay in bed, watching CNN on the TV. Experts were arguing meanly about tax proposals. “When you were with Peggy,” Mattina said, “was that a time you lived more deeply?”

  She caught me by surprise, although she asked quite gently. I shouldn’t have been surprised. “Things between us were always dissolving,” I said.

  This was true enough, and I could see Mattina took this answer well. But it was a trick answer too, a Buddhist answer.

  I kissed Mattina all over her face, to soothe her and to show her she had me for her own, which she did. After she fell asleep, I stared into the dark and I shed my tears for Peggy and for what we hadn’t had. She was never going to be my lover again. I should never have gone to California, should never have left New York, all those years ago. I was sure now that that had been a mistake. I was bitter against myself for that.

  And yet I would have said—I always said—that leaving Peggy, getting free of her, had brought me into a truer, fuller life, caused me to make better use of myself. I knew this. I would have traded any of it at that moment to bring Peggy back. It was my luck that no one ever gets a choice like that.

  In the early hours of the morning, I thought I heard Eli’s music coming from the room next door in a fog of jittery noise. Why wasn’t he using his headphones? Well, he wasn’t. Mattina stirred in bed and sai
d, “Our Eli.” Peggy had been a flighty, capricious, and cruelly uneven mother to him, but she had loved him intensely in her way. He was listening to a tape of his band or one like it. I was sure that Peggy wouldn’t have minded at all being mourned in those pounding lines of percussive force.

  I myself had been trying to meditate, to wish Peggy well, wherever she was. I’d been awake for some time doing this. At first I thought I heard Eli getting dressed (so early?), but then I was fairly sure that he was dancing. Nodding to the music, with his eyes closed, twitching and sliding. I knew how he looked. And he was smoking a cigarette while he danced—the Indian herbal kind he liked these days, with a scent like flower incense that wafted into the hall. Peggy, being dead, could not see us, but she would have been glad at the sight: me sitting cross-legged on the floor, Eli dancing in his underwear, the two of us in our frost-windowed rooms in that somnolent hotel, making peace with her absence as well as we could. I was thinking of the lines Rilke wrote for his own tombstone,

  Rose, oh pure contradiction, joy

  of being No-one’s sleep under so many lids.

  IDEAS OF HEAVEN

  I was still quite a small child when my father went away to fight for the North in 1862. I was so little they had to explain to me over and over why he had left us, why President Lincoln needed him. I was impatient for my father’s letters and very excited when they arrived. I would jump up and down and run through the rooms of the house in a way that I was not allowed otherwise. When we didn’t get a letter for a month, my older brother Fred scared me by being scared himself. He said that since our father was the regiment’s doctor, who would tend him if he were hurt? Who would stanch his bleeding or dress his burns? One night when my sister Maude, who was almost grown, lay in bed next to me, I dreamed I saw my father in heaven. Perhaps it was not really a dream but an idea I was turning over in my mind. My father seemed very present, very near, and had apparently been this near to us for some weeks, like a pet we had not known was in the house all along. The sight of his face made me realize how long it had been since I had seen his own true features, but now he was purely there, himself.

  In fact my father was not dead. The mail was held up for weeks, but he was home safe by summer. My brother Fred called me a little cheat for having had such a dream, but I believed that I had had a true glimpse, however blurred and shaded, of another layer, hidden and precious, always lurking nearby. I was too little to think about this clearly, and I could not hold on to the sense of it very well, but the dream was mine, and I kept it.

  FRED WAS MY favorite, of my siblings. He used to write me letters, once he was away at college, full of sentences in languages he liked to pretend he had mastered. “O oktapodi darlino—as we say in Greek—hello, my darling little octopus.” “Nolite esse amens goosus. I hope you’re paying attention, Lizzie, that’s Latin for don’t be a silly goose all the time.” I was fifteen by then, but he still thought of me as much younger than I was. It surprised him when he brought home a friend at Christmas and the friend seemed to enjoy talking to me.

  We lived in a small town, not far from Hartford, and it was Easter when Fred came home with his friend Bennett. Maude, who was married by this time and living on a small farm, played the piano in our church. When she took up “The God of mercy be adored,/ Who calls our souls from death,” the roll of it swept over me with a freshly triumphant meaning. I was quite lifted up at the time anyway, because I had been talking to Fred’s friend all week.

  He asked my opinion on a number of subjects, although I could not talk about much except the amusing things the younger children had done while under my care. I asked about his studies, and he said that philology was making him more religious. I could make no more sense of this sentence than if he had baa’ed like a sheep. “Do you think there is one God over all people?” he said. “Of course,” I said. Bennett said that an Englishman serving in Calcutta in the 1780s had found very many words in Sanskrit that were so like Greek and Latin that their similarity was surely not a coincidence, and scholars thought this probably proved we had once all spoken the same language. “I am sure we all did,” I said. “How could it be otherwise?” I had long felt that the earth was linked by a great net of glorious strands.

  And so we began to write back and forth, Bennett and I. Sometimes he enclosed little puzzles and jokes for my sister Phebe and my youngest brother Lawrence. I sent him sketches I had made of my father’s horse, Scipio, and of the vegetables in the kitchen garden. Everyone liked Ben and thought he had a pleasant way about him. After a few months of these letters, my mother asked me when I thought Ben was going to declare himself, but no one really thought he was a trifler. My sister Maude made fun of my sketches—“what man wants to look at a portrait of a parsnip?”—but everyone was glad enough when Ben proposed, and we were married just past my seventeenth birthday.

  I HAD THOUGHT a great deal about what love was. I believed that the deep affections of my own family and what I had felt on occasion as the radiance of God were connected, that the human version “participated” in the Divine. I was away from Bennett during much of our courtship, and I walked through the streets of our town during those days with a great longing to be in his arms, to rest against him. I was not ignorant about physical love, but I had not quite understood the way that this diffuse yearning would locate itself so pointedly in the vital tissues of my body, once Ben was actually with me. And perhaps I was startled most by the changes in his body (that being the aspect I knew the least about), by the swollen, hardened flesh rising from my Ben, the gentlest of men. He was as much a novice to the act as I was, and we rowed through these new waters together.

  I saw why a man and wife must never leave one another, having been to these places in each other’s company. Afterwards I thought about how I might be a mother, at any time now, and it seemed right to me that there was a state so much like fever—a spell or a melting fit, a possession by great forces—that was the portal to this realm.

  MY MOTHER SAID that Ben was good-tempered but impractical, and I would have to be a careful housekeeper, which she knew I could be. After we were married, we went away to live at Briar Field Academy, where Ben taught the younger boys. He was very patient with his pupils, though I was afraid that the bigger students were often spoiled and willful. “Don’t be outraged for me, please, Liz,” he said. “It makes me wearier.”

  I missed my parents, but Ben’s were nearby and we had Sundays with them. After church, his father and brothers would talk about the sermon, as if it were an urgent piece of current news requiring their remarks. My own jolly family had mocked my earnestness, and so I quite liked the tone of these talks.

  And on several of these afternoons I was secretly sure that I was expecting a child, and so the seriousness of the world was something I felt very keenly.

  Each month when I saw I was not pregnant after all, I knew myself to be a silly woman who had fooled herself. I did not pray to conceive, because I had been taught by my father that petitions were a superstitious use of prayer. He always scorned people who thought they could pluck at the Divine sleeve for particular favors. I kept myself busy at home and I gave myself what counsel I could.

  Later, of course, this seemed like a carefree time to me. In the seventh year of marriage I had my first baby, my sweet James, and only a year and eight months later I had my beautiful Lucy. There was no question of hiring a servant on Ben’s salary, and I had no idle moments anymore—indeed I could not remember what I had once done with all my leisure. But I had become a fairly cunning manager of our household economy, and I did quite well for my poppets, I thought. They could toddle and run about on the school grounds in the open air, though James was sometimes too rough for his sister. Ben made them a toy wagon—a wooden crate with pot-covers for wheels—and they liked to haul horse-chestnuts back and forth in it.

  One winter afternoon when James was almost six, Ben came back from walking with him by the river. Bits of snow were melting on their coats. Be
n said to me, “I don’t know how people live without a sense of God.” I said I thought such people’s lives must be vapid and tedious, without color or depth.

  He and James had come across a bird on the path—a starling with its legs up, stiff and frozen. James, who was fond of birds, had asked if it was dead, and Ben said he thought so. As James drew nearer the feathered corpse, he said to his father, “But I’m not going to really die, am I?” We had just been telling him that Jesus’ resurrection proved that goodness was more powerful than death; his mind was tender and responsive.

  “It made me remember,” Ben said, “how many people all over the world look at a dead bird and feel only dread for themselves and a natural horror of decay. I think they must live always with a taste of horror.”

  I knew the movements of my husband’s thoughts and what he meant by all over the world. A young cousin of Ben’s had just come back from serving five years in a mission on the south coast of China and he had talked during Sunday’s dinner about the unrelieved misery of the people. When Ben first said “without a sense of God,” I pictured only the vain puffery of some of our coldly prosperous neighbors, but Ben’s notions roamed across a wider field. It gave me a queer feeling to think suddenly of China instead.

  I HAD ALWAYS known that none of us would have been Christian if the Disciples had not gone out and made nuisances of themselves among the Gentiles. The next evening, Ben wondered aloud what it might be like to serve in an overseas mission as his cousin had, and we began to have conversations, night after night, in which we tried to reason from this rash hypothesis. Fright crept over me often, yet I felt very steady. How plain and sober my Ben was, tallying the risks (the unhealthful climate, the years away from people we loved) and the beauties (to see someone feeling for the first time what Christ was, to know one had done this one good thing in the world). In the end all the reasons against going had a selfish grounding, we both came to think. I liked those suppers, the long deliberations, and each of us looking to see what the other truly meant.