Broken Vessels (15 page)

But I am afraid of more than memory: I am afraid of death, my own and that of everyone I love: and injury, to me and everyone I love. I am most afraid for the physically weakest, Cadence, and today when Peggy wheeled me from my bed to the dining room for lunch, I saw one of Cadence's music boxes on the table and at once thought of seeing it with her gone, with her dead, and then tears were on my cheeks and I took a Xanax, a tranquilizer.

I think often of soldiers, especially those from Vietnam because it is more recent. I wonder if my fear is like theirs, with the same causes, and I know their experience was worse, because I was not in a war but struck in an instant during a peaceful summer, then was in a hospital near home, and my family and friends were with me. Some veterans have told me of their fear long after their wars.

From my bed now the world is a frightful place of death and pain and sorrow. We must love soldiers who have fought. Their nationality does not matter; their very characters do not. We must love them because of what they suffered, the terrible things done to them and to their comrades; and some of them have done terrible things too. I was a Marine officer in peacetime. Today, reading James Kennaway's wonderful
Tunes of Glory
, I remembered how deeply I loved my troops. I thought of landmines in Vietnam. I thought of watching my troops being killed or injured. And I believed it possible that I could force Vietnamese peasants to walk through an area we were afraid was mined; and that if it were possible for me to do such a thing, it would be out of love for my men, and that I would know I was committing terrible and unforgivable murder, because war is terrible and unforgivable.

23 May 1988

Twenty-two months to the day since the car hit me. A year ago, in May, with much prayer, I forgave its driver. I have read a lot about Vietnam since January of 1987, and I have talked with two close friends who were Marines there. I am still in a wheelchair, but I have very little physical pain now, and the fear is gone. So my soul is not as fragile and I know now that even war is forgivable, as all human actions can be, ought to be. After the dead are buried, and the maimed have left the hospitals and started their new lives, after the physical pain of grief has become, with time, a permanent wound in the soul, a sorrow that will last as long as the body does, after the horrors become nightmares and sudden daylight memories, then comes the transcendent and common bond of human suffering, and with that comes forgiveness, and with forgiveness comes love, even for the men who in suits and ties start and end wars, but most of all for the soldiers, whether at Borodino or Gettysburg or Hue, who fought and died and lost arms and legs and sight and hearing and kinetic muscles and functioning brains and remained physically whole but were never again able to love with wholeness another human being: those young soldiers who fought not for ideas but because they loved one another with a greater love than nearly all we civilians ever witness, ever give.

1986/1988

A W
OMAN IN
A
PRIL

I
N NEW YORK CITY
, the twenty-fifth of April 1988 was a warm and blue day, and daylight savings time held the sun in the sky after dinner and all the way from the restaurant to Lincoln Center, where we were supposed to be at eight o'clock. The way from the restaurant to Lincoln Center was sidewalks, nearly all of them with curbs and no curb cuts, and streets with traffic; and we were with my friend David Novak, and my friend and agent, Philip Spitzer, pushing my wheelchair and pulling it up curbs and easing it down them while I watched the grills and windshields of cars. I call David the Skipper because he was a Marine lieutenant then captain in Vietnam and led troops in combat, so I defer to his rank, although I was a peacetime captain while he was still a civilian. Philip is the brother I never had by blood.

Philip of course lives in New York. I happily do not. Neither does the Skipper. He lives here in Massachusetts, and he and his wife drove to New York that day, a Monday, and my daughter Suzanne and son Andre and friends and I came in two more cars, because Andre and I were reading that night at Lincoln Center with Mary Morris and Diana Davenport. In Massachusetts we had very little sun and warmth during the spring, and that afternoon, somewhere in Connecticut, we drove into sunlight, and soon the trees along the road were green with leaves. We had not seen those either at home, only the promise of buds.

At close to eight o'clock the sky was still blue and the Skipper pushed me across the final street, then turned my chair and leaned it backward and pulled it up steps to the Plaza outside the Center. We began crossing the greyish white concrete floor and, as Philip spoke and pointed up, I looked at the tall buildings flanking the Plaza, angles of grey-white, of city color, against the sky, deepening now, but not much, still the bright blue of spring after such a long winter of short days, lived in bed, in the wheelchair, in physical therapy, in the courthouse losing my wife and two little girls. Philip told us of a Frenchman last year tightrope walking across the space between these buildings, without a net.

Then I looked at the people walking on the Plaza. My only good memories of New York are watching people walk on the streets, and watching people in bars and restaurants, and some meals or drinks with friends, and being with Philip. But one summer I spent five days with him and for the first time truly saw the homeless day after day and night after night, and from then on, whenever I went there, I knew the New York I was in, the penthouses and apartments and cabs and restaurants, were not New York, anymore than the Czar's Russia was the Russia of Chekhov's freed serfs, with their hopes destroyed long before they were born. Still on that spring Monday I loved watching the faces on the Plaza.

Like Boston, New York has beautiful women to look at, though in New York the women, in general, are made up more harshly, and they dress more self-consciously; there is something insular about their cosmetics and clothing, as if they have come to believe that sitting at a mirror with brushes and tubes and vials, and putting on a dress of a certain cut and color starts them on the long march to spiritual fulfillment with a second wind. And in New York the women walk as though in the rain; in Boston many women stroll. But then most New Yorkers walk like people in rain, leaving the stroll to police officers, hookers, beggars and wandering homeless, and teenagers who are yet unharried by whatever preoccupations preoccupy so many from their driving preoccupation with loneliness and death.

Women were on the Plaza, their pace slower as they neared the building, and looking to my right I saw a lovely one. She could have been thirty, or five years on either side of it. She wore a dark brown miniskirt, or perhaps it was black; I saw it and her strong legs in net stockings for only a moment, because they were in my natural field of vision from my chair. But a woman's face is what I love. She was in profile and had soft thick brown hair swaying at her shoulders as she strode with purpose but not hurry, only grace. She was about forty feet away, enough distance so that, when I looked up, I saw her face against the sky.

“Skipper,” I said. “Accidently push me into
her
.”

The forward motion of her legs and arms did not pause, but she immediately turned to me and, as immediately, her lips spread in a smile, and her face softened with it, and her eyes did, all at once from a sudden release in her heart that was soft too in her voice: “I heard that.”

She veered toward me, smiling still, with brightened eyes.

“It was a compliment,” I said.

The Skipper was pushing my chair, Philip was beside me, and she was coming closer. Then she said: “I know.”

She angled back to her first path, as though it were painted there for her to follow, and Philip said: “That
neve
r happens in New York.”

“It's the wheelchair,” I said. “I'm harmless.”

But I knew that was not true. There was no time to explain it then, and anyway I wanted to hold her gift for a while before giving it away with words.

Living in the world as a cripple allows you to see more clearly the crippled hearts of some people whose bodies are whole and sound. All of us, from time to time, suffer this crippling. Some suffer it daily and nightly; and while most of us, nearly all of us, have compassion and love in our hearts, we cannot or will not see these barely visible wounds of other human beings, and so cannot or will not pick up the telephone or travel to someone's home or write a note or make some other seemingly trifling gesture to give to someone what only we, and God, can give: an hour's respite, or a day's, or a night's; and sometimes more than respite: sometimes joy.

Yet in a city whose very sidewalks show the failure of love, the failure to make agape a bureaucracy, a young woman turned to me with instinctive anger or pride, and seeing me in a wheelchair she at once felt not pity but lighthearted compassion. For seeing one of her kind wounded, she lay down the shield and sword she had learned to carry (
I dried my tears/ And armed my fears/ With ten thousand/ shields and spears
, William Blake wrote), and with the light of the sun between us, ten or fifteen feet between us, her face and voice embraced me.

For there is a universality to a wounded person: again and again, for nearly two years, my body has drawn sudden tenderness from men and women I have seen for only those moments in their lives when they helped me with their hands or their whole bodies or only their eyes and lips and tongues. They see, in their short time with me, a man injured, as they could be; a man always needing the care of others, as they could too. Only the children stare with frightened curiosity, as they do at funeral processions and the spoken news of death, for they know in their hearts that they too will die, and they believe they will grow up and marry and have children, but they cannot yet believe they will die.

But I am a particular kind of cripple. In New York I was not sitting on a sidewalk, my back against a wall, and decades of misfortune and suffering in my heart. I was not wearing dirty clothes on an unwashed body. Philip and the Skipper wore suits and ties. I rode in a nine-hundred-dollar wheelchair, and rolled across the Plaza at Lincoln Center. Yet I do not ask that woman, on seeing my body, to be struck there in the sunlight, to stand absolutely still and silent and hear like rushing tide the voices of all who suffer in body and in spirit and in both, then to turn before my dazzled eyes and go back to her home and begin next morning to live as Mother Teresa, as Dorothy Day. No: she is one of us, and what she said and did on that April evening was, like the warm sunlit sky, enough: for me, for the end of winter, for the infinite possibilities of the human heart.

1988

B
ASTILLE
D
AY

E
ARLY IN THE
morning in Louisiana in 1963, on the fourteenth of July, my father died. He left me forks and spoons made in New Orleans of silver coins from the court of the queen who said:
Let them eat cake
; and a sword an ancestor had worn or wielded or never touched on Bastille Day; and a Colt .41 revolver his own father's death had released to him; and the watch I slid from his wrist before they came to his house, his bed, and lifted and rolled and drove him away. Years later, someone stole the sword from a house in Massachusetts where my first four children lived with their mother; and later someone stole the Colt from an apartment in Massachusetts where I lived alone. The watch died finally, in 1980, the year my mother did.

Today is Bastille Day in 1988. Since I was a Marine captain on leave to watch with my father while he died I have lost three wives, and daily and nightly living with six children, and my left leg above the knee and most of the function of my right one. His body was as thin as mine became in 1986, struck by a car on a highway north of Boston, my life and brain and nearly all of me spared. When I came home from the hospital after seven weeks and ten operations, I saw myself in a long mirror above a chest of drawers. My son, Jeb, was pushing me in my wheelchair, down the hall to the bedroom; and I said to him:
I look like my father, the day before he died
.

Today a man named Hope phoned from Chicago to set me free with money willed by a man named MacArthur. I see my father leaving his malignant flesh, and peasants throwing over a throne my father's family served, and I know the very smallness of my needs: the house, and the hired women who keep it and me going. My father sang
la Marseillaise
. Now I see him assaulting with me the gate, the walls, the prison and armory of our flesh: my father in his final and radiant harmony, and I crippled in my chair: mere men, rushing to grace.

1988

H
USBANDS

O
N A SUNLIT
December afternoon a UPS man carrying a long, wide package came up the steep hill of my driveway. The width of the package was from his armpit to his hand. I saw him through the glass door in front of my desk, and wheeled to the kitchen door and opened it, and waited for him to come up the series of six connected ramps, four of them long and parallel to each other. One ramp would be too steep; you need one inch of grade for every twelve inches you climb or descend. Turning onto the last ramp he saw me and smiled and asked how I was doing. I see a lot of UPS men. It is a simple way to shop. He had blond hair and a face reddened by the winter sun and wind, and perhaps from climbing the hill. I told him I was fine.

“That's an exercise machine,” I said. “How do you feel about putting it in the bedroom?”

Whenever I ask someone to do something for me, I am saying aloud that I cannot do it, or cannot do it well, or simply, or easily. So I very often ask with odd sentences. In the first year after my injury, with one leg gone above the knee and the other in a cast and usually hurting, I said things like
I wonder if there's any cheese or Does anyone want hot chocolate?
I still do.