How to Fall (3 page)

“There was no return address.”

“Answer another way, get Happy Bloom to mention ladies, or green. Some trick. But then, I don't know, I didn't need an answer any more. I just wanted you to read the words, to wonder. When you look out of the screen with that face, it's like a carving, you're looking for me, you're looking at me . . .”

“Yes,” he soothed, thinking of the camera's red bulb, the thing they had to look at.

“At school, they all have boyfriends,” and she was all at once lonely and forty, and nothing had ever happened to her and nothing would. “I love your silence,” she said after a while.

“My silence—it's imposed.”

“Everybody at home talks all the time. I love the way you dance.”

“The silent character—Bloom made it for me.”

“I love the way you fall down.”

He had mastered the technique young, while still at the Jesuits. He had gone to every circus, every vaudeville show. He studied clowns and acrobats. And in the first troupe and then the second he spent seasons watching, imitating, getting it right. He practiced on the wire, he practiced with the tumblers. Never broke a bone. Learned how not to take the impact on the back of the head or the base of the spine or the elbows or the knees. Knew which muscles to tighten, which to relax… She said: “You make me want to fall, but with my, you know, I can't.” She paused. “I
have
fallen,” she
confessed. She took off her glasses. Her little eyes softened. Would she ever be pretty? “Actually, I have fallen in love,” she said. “With you,” she added, in case he'd missed her drift.

There were several things he could do at this juncture, and he considered each one of them. He could award her an intent, sorrowful look, he knew which one to use; and from his gaze and her flustered response there would develop, during future meetings, a kind of affection. Stranger romances had flourished. When she turned twenty he would be . . . Or he could talk smart: prattle tediously about the Irish in America, his hard boyhood, the Fathers, the early jobs, the indifference of the public, the disappointing trajectory of his life. Bore her to fidgets, push her calf-love out the swinging doors . . . Or he could offer to introduce her to Paolo, what a pair... Or he could pretend to get drunk and stumble out of Cassidy's leaving her to pay their bill. She probably had a couple of fives tucked into that orthopedic shoe.

He did none of those things. Instead he reached his hand across the table and gently pulled the nose, the nose with the little bump.

 

They lingered over their lunch and then walked the length of Fifth Avenue. Walking, she hardly limped at all. “I don't do sports,” she told him. “Steps are sometimes difficult,” she said mildly. They discussed, oh, the Empire State Building, and the dock strike, and Hizzoner: the idle conversation of two friends who have met after a long silence, and who may or may not meet again. At the subway entrance on Eighth Street they paused. He took both her hands and swung them, first side to side, then overhead. London Bridge is falling down. Then he let them go.

“This afternoon has been . . .” she began.

“Yes,” he said.

She clumped down the stairs.

 

That Thursday they did a take-off on
On The Town
—they couldn't make fun of the War, but dancing sailors were fair game. A movie tapster danced with them, another guy on his way down. But the spoof was too short. Three minutes to go before the good-night monologue, signaled the Brigadier. So Happy said “Sweet Georgia,” under his breath—they'd done that number together on the circuit a dozen years earlier, feet don't forget. It was a Nicholas Brothers routine, so what, they never claimed originality, Happy stole most of his jokes. The Brigadier said “Georgia” to the orchestra, and then she hooked the Hollywood fellow off the stage, and there they were, Joss and Happy, dancing, just dancing. Happy flapped into the wings thirty seconds before the finish, to get out of the sailor suit and into the tux. Joss kept cramp-rolling. He felt Mamie's gray eyes on him and his on hers. He double-timed into a leap, why not, and he kicked midair, heels meeting, and he dropped onto his feet and then slid down slantwise, perfect, thigh taking the weight, and now he was horizontal. The camera's lens lowered, smoothly following him; those guys were getting better. Elbow on floor and chin on palm and body stretched out and one leg raised, foot amiably twitching, Joss grinned. Yes: grinned.

“What made you smile, they'll get rid of you,” griped Mary an hour later.

He touched her hair. So dry; you'd think one of her cigarettes would set it on fire.

“I was smiling at you,” he said.

T
hey were not adventurous, no, no! An unremarkable couple. Whenever someone suggested otherwise they raised four protesting palms in negation as if they were under arrest.

They lived in a small weathered house halfway up Calderstone Lane, the street that winds from Jefferson Boulevard to the top of Godolphin Hill and rewards the climber with a view of the Boston skyline. Clara and Valerie frequently climbed their hill; also they worked, gardened, paid taxes, got together with their many friends. Most summers they traveled to a village in Spain they'd discovered just after the War, when they were first in love. Then Valerie had seemed to Clara as beautiful as a sculpted boy—taut as a boy, bold as a boy, eyes swiveling like a fascinated boy's, and occasionally possessed of a boy's slingshot-straight power to wound. Then square-faced Clara had seemed to Valerie as authoritative as a Roman aedile. Val remembered the pictures of aediles, or at least of their busts, in her Latin Grammar—municipal
grandees who supervised the building of sewers and roads in the ancient City.

Now Clara and Valerie were in their placid fifties. Each summer they smuggled in a bottle of absinthe, and on festive occasions treated themselves to a thimbleful. They enjoyed legal alcohols too, in moderation; and, also in moderation, tobacco, caffeine, and a smokeable opium they were sometimes able to procure—the year was nineteen sixty-five. Walking was their sole exercise, unless one counted spirited conversation. They made love, yes; but affection had supplanted passion. Valerie taught flute and recorder in the Godolphin elementary schools. She was assistant director of the high school orchestra, and she played with various amateur groups. Clara practiced pediatrics.

The illness—it was a mystery. Much that happens to the body is mysterious. Valerie experienced fever, fatigue. Her physician verified an infection. Medicines failed to defeat the infection. The fever persisted; fatigue became exhaustion. Clara and the physician treated her at home for a while, with a little corps of nurses. They tried one intravenous antibiotic after another. Valerie sank.

She was dying, though of what nobody could say. She entered a nursing home—that is, she was transported there in an ambulance, holding Clara's hand. She did not seem fearful or agitated. These things happen, Clara said bleakly to herself; all doctors are acquainted with inexplicable illnesses and inexplicable deaths. Valerie lay for two days in a room six stories above Jefferson Boulevard. Clara, standing at the window, looked down at the Boulevard's elms, themselves ravaged by disease. Valerie breathed deeply but infrequently. Her pulse was shallow but regular. Then she breathed less often. Her pulse became fainter. She died.

She died at ten at night, in the presence of Clara and an old, kindly nurse. Clara borrowed the nurse's stethoscope to listen to Valerie's dead heart and the nurse's flashlight to examine Valerie's dead eyes. Then she said she would take a walk: she must leave this place that life had fled from. The nurse tried in vain to stop her.

When Clara returned she found the nurse, hysterical, and a Russian doctor, bewildered. Summoned to Pronounce, he had discovered the patient weak but alive. Vital signs concurred. The two women assured him that an hour earlier, respiration and cardiac function had failed. Recalled to Life, he finally wrote on the chart—he was of a literary turn.

Where had Clara walked, that fateful hour? Oh, around the Town. She trudged along the Boulevard. The trolley from Boston passed, lit up like a nightclub. It carried two passengers. Aimlessly she paused at one of the bookstores in Godolphin Square. The announcement of its imminent closing was pasted on the window. Walking again, she dodged several automobiles. She noted with sadness that Godolphin—once lively even at this hour, its stores open, its citizens strolling—was flattening into a suburb. Valerie too would have found this grievous... Clara sank onto a bench at a bus stop. She covered her face with her hands and wept for her beloved.

Godolphin's decline was one of the many things they talked about during the weeks of convalescence, in their bedroom, Valerie immobile on the bed like her own sarcophagus—the illness took its time departing from bones and joints—and Clara in the tufted chair. Their trees, lindens, were in full and fragrant leaf, and the light entering the room through them was as green as the sea. The robust furniture they had bought in Spain seemed to dissolve in this watery surround. Yes, a bookstore was closing, the elms were
dying, one of their friends had fearfully installed a household alarm. The Town was dead. But Valerie was alive! Could they attribute her revival to the various substances floating in her veins? They couldn't be certain, they didn't crave certainty, they planned to discuss the matter till the end of their days.

The nurse allowed herself to be quoted in the
Godolphin Times.
“There were no signs of life,” she said. The Russian doctor was next. “Me, I never saw her dead,” he declared. “I walked in, she breathed.”

When her recovery was complete, Valerie returned to work. One evening on the way home she looked into the window of Nature's Remedies and saw an ointment called Val's. In the café next door somebody unfamiliar pointed a finger at her and somebody else unfamiliar nodded. Tourists: Godolphin's first. Then there was an article in a Boston daily; and then a new inn advertised its proximity to the place of miracle; and then a great number of enterprises opened all at once, like flowers which had been waiting for the sun.

 

“Faith healers! Two of them, side by side in that alley, they'll be strangling each other . . .”

“Which alley?” Val inquired, and dipped her forefinger into the pot of honey that gleamed on their breakfast table. So unsanitary; for she would lick it now, and then dip it again, and again.

“The alley next to the movie house, with the arcade.”

“Oh, yes, kids smoke pot there.”

“And some fortuneteller has hung out a shingle upstairs from the florist. Madame Kissmyaski. There's a new chotchke shop that calls itself Lourdes. The next thing you know we'll have holy Indians, chanting . . .”

“They're here already. Shaved heads, yellow robes. Clara, their music is extraordinary, Mixolydian, I think.”

Clara groaned. “Godolphin will become a . . . Destination.”

“Vaut le detour.”
Into the honey pot went the finger with all its germs. Into the curved mouth now. Clara stood up, glared at Val, kneed away her chair... and moved around the table, and bent to taste those sticky lips. Oh, my love, my living love: what we might have missed.

“Darling! You have a patient, I have a class . . .”

“They'll wait,” loosening her robe, loosening Val's robe; and Val knelt; and Clara felt the lips and their honey.

During the next few months bed-and-breakfasts multiplied. Herb sellers unfolded tables on the sidewalks and sold twigs and powders. The Godolphin police were reluctant to chase them away. A new restaurant opened—
Mirabile.

What could Clara do? She had a practice to maintain—she was, after all, their household's chief support. Besides, she loved medicine. One day at the hospital she ran into the Russian doctor. He was a cardiologist, it turned out. Over coffee he told her that his own practice was flourishing. “For years I nearly starved,” he said. “Now they run to me, the congestives, the infarcts. And you know what?” and he leaned forward until his big nose almost touched hers. “A lot of them—I make better.”

Well, a little notoriety; and then renewed confidence—Clara could explain it all. A few successes, more confidence... “I have been Selected,” the cardiologist preened.

That night: “There's this Committee,” Val said. “Erecting a statue.”

“To
you?”

“Well . . . of me. Don't frown that way, darling. I told them I wouldn't pose.”

The Committee engaged a sculptor anyway—an art student willing to work cheap. She installed the statue in the park at the top of Godolphin Hill, and chiseled V-A-L-E-R-I-E into the pedestal. Clara consulted their lawyer, who said that a suit would be a waste of money. First names were common property.

Val's photograph was off-limits, though. Most undertakings were content to reproduce the Statue on their signs. But the Statue didn't really resemble her. A windswept woman in vague draperies leaned forward like a ship's figurehead, her hands clasped in front of her bosom in a prayerful posture that Valerie would have died rather than adopt.

“One of those talk programs wants an interview,” she reported to Clara.

“Over
my
dead body.”

“Okay, okay.”

It was late at night. Val was already in bed, reading and smoking; Clara was struggling out of her clothes. She had gained weight during this confusing time. “Would you really like to be interviewed?” she growled, trousers halfway down her fat thighs. “Become a thing of the media? Belong to the public?”

Val blew smoke in that inviting way; amazing that an exhalation could accomplish so much. “I don't know,” she confessed. “Mostly I want to belong to you.”